Darwinism and Its Discontents

RALPH HITCHENS

Poolesville

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It amazes me that so many people resist intelligent design as an explanation of mankind's existence. Given the well-documented destruction of each other and the environment, clearly some force in the universe created and guides our ruinous propensities. The difficulty now is deciding what being to blame for this unintelligent design called man.

ALLAN B. LEFCOWITZ

Washington

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Peter Slevin's article said that opponents of intelligent design characterize it as "a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry."

Intelligent design does not necessarily dispute common ancestry or natural selection, but rather that random chance was sufficient to provide the changes necessary for descent to occur (hence the need for intelligence).

Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, no model has been developed that shows these changes could have occurred by chance according to reasonable probabilities. Advocates of Darwinian evolution do not want to have to defend random chance, which is why they defend common ancestry, at least until they can silence the debate.

NATALIA RICE

Ellicott City

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So Southern Baptist minister Terry Fox opposes the teaching of evolution because "most people in Kansas don't think we came from monkeys."

This is not a novel argument; in an 1860 debate at Oxford University, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce -- a leading critic of Darwinism -- mockingly asked scholar T.H. Huxley whether he was descended from apes on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. Huxley's response is worth noting, even 145 years later:

"A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.

"If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man -- a man of restless and versatile intellect -- who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

MARK ECKENWILER

Washington